Identifying Organic and Promoted posts

A Promoted/Paid Post is a post with some social spend behind it, whereas an Organic Post gathers interactions simply through the content itself.

Today, most brands allocate a budget for social spend. And we’d all be kidding ourselves if we didn’t give some of our Brand’s Posts a boost every now and then. But like most marketers, we’re concerned with benchmarking.

So how are we supposed to figure out if our competitor’s campaign is performing well because they’ve made mind-blowingly good content that’s gone viral or if there’s some green enhancing their performance?

For Facebook, Xia, our AI, analyzed thousands of Posts from multiple industries and Brand Pages of sizes ranging from thousands to millions of Fans. With exploratory research, Xia identified patterns in Likes, Comments, Shares and Fan Count over time that differentiates Promoted Posts from Organic Posts. Xia looks for these same patterns in velocity of engagement to predict whether a Post is Promoted or not. With a robust sample data set of Facebook Posts, Xia our proprietary machine learning algorithm, has an overall prediction accuracy of a whopping 98%.

See how Promoted Posts affects Engagement

After giving you a way to see any brand’s promoted posts, we’ve got charts to showcase metrics concerning these posts. Now we have graphs with metrics on the number of promoted and organic posts of any brand, the difference in the levels of engagement between these posts and the effect of promoted posts in a brand’s overall engagement. We’re also showing the small changes in the engagement score when a post is promoted.

Find these charts under Compare > Posts > Brand > Engagement and switch over to the Promoted/Organic section on the page.

Please note: Our Promoted Post Detection feature was introduced on February 5th, 2016. Data for this metric will only be available after this date.

On Twitter, we can pick up on content published via the Twitter Ads source. Head over to Brand Tweets under the Focus section of Twitter, and check it out under Tweet Source.